


this house is full of ghosts (and they all look like you)

by nicole_writes



Series: after it's over, all we have is what's left and what we make for ourselves [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, Black Eagles Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Black Eagles Route, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mentioned Annette Fantine Dominic, Mentioned Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert, Mentioned Dedue Molinaro, Mentioned Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd, Mentioned Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Mentioned Mercedes von Martritz, Mentioned Sylvain Jose Gautier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:54:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26262223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicole_writes/pseuds/nicole_writes
Summary: Ingrid returns home after the war.
Relationships: Annette Fantine Dominic & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Ingrid Brandl Galatea, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Dedue Molinaro, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Mercedes von Martritz, Ingrid Brandl Galatea & Sylvain Jose Gautier, Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Series: after it's over, all we have is what's left and what we make for ourselves [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1909096
Comments: 24
Kudos: 44





	this house is full of ghosts (and they all look like you)

**Author's Note:**

> I....don't really have much to say.

The ride from Enbarr back to Galatea territory is long and lonely. Ingrid doesn’t want to stretch it out any longer than it already is, so she pushes herself and her pegasus to the brink of exhaustion every day that she rides until the rich soil turns to rocky dust beneath her and she flies lower to the ground, breathing in the familiar, cold Faerghus air. 

She touches down at the edge of the property that belongs to her family and she stares at the Galatea manor: big and empty at the top of the hill. 

Ingrid pulls out the hunting dagger she was gifted when she was twelve and slashes the reins and bridle and tack on her pegasus until it falls free into strips of leather on the ground. The child in her is angry with both her treatment of expensive material and tack that carries so many memories for her. The Ingrid she is today wants to burn all of it. 

She pushes away her pegasus by the nose and then the flank, urging him to fly away. He whinnies at her, but Ingrid doesn’t let up, shooing him away until he flaps his wings and jumps, moving away from her with a sad noise. 

There is no more war so there is no more need for her to ride. 

* * *

The manor is closed and locked up tightly and Ingrid doesn’t have a key. She smashes a window on the front door and picks her way through the broken glass she leaves in the entryway. She unlocks the door, to ease her comings and goings later, and then looks around her childhood home. 

Dust clings to every surface and there are cobwebs strung between bannisters and rails on the chandelier above the front hall. The floors are scratched as they have always been and the rugs that cover them are matted and tattered. From the front entrance, she can just barely glimpse the portrait gallery at the top of the stairs of her entire family. She leans Luín against the wall by the door and moves closer to the stairs, staring up at the paintings.

Morbid curiosity drives her to climb the stairs slowly, her boots clicking on the wooded stairs as they creak beneath her. She stops in front of the first portrait: her father. He died defending Galatea from Empire excursions on the Alliance side four months ago. Her mother’s portrait, smiling and radiant, is gathering dust on her father’s right. Her mother has been gone for a long time. 

On her father’s left is a patch of barren wall and Ingrid’s stomach twisted. Six years ago, there had been a portrait of her that had hung there. She’s not surprised that he took it down.

Her brothers are memorialized here as well, staring straight with small smiles or flat expressions. Their paintings are as lifeless as her brothers are now. 

Ingrid walks back downstairs.

* * *

There are two broken windows in the parlour and half of the decorations in the room are knocked over and smashed or missing, leaving the empty shelves and tables to gather dust. There had never been much in the way of decoration anyway, thanks to the barren lands of Galatea, but they had still been nobles. 

Ingrid approaches the mantle slowly, staring at the chipped and dusty bricks. Whatever was in the fireplace had long since burned to ashes, leaving a fine grey layer of soot along the base of the pit. She knows what used to sit on top of the mantle and she’s a little upset to see it gone. 

The ceremonial sword had been a gift from House Fraldarius to House Galatea as a symbol of Glenn and Ingrid’s engagement. It had been the centrepiece on the mantle for as long as Ingrid can remember, but she also knows that the sword is worth a fair bit of money and that of all the things that have been stolen from her house in the last five years, the sword is something that she should have expected to be gone. 

She traces the Crest of Fraldarius into the dust pattern atop the mantle and thinks of Felix.

She didn’t kill him herself, but she might as well have. She knows that he had been watching her when the Empire stormed Arianrhod. He had watched her to see if she would really cut down Kingdom soldiers, some of whom originated in Galatea. 

Ingrid had made a request to Edelgard that Felix be buried with his father in the grounds outside the Silver Maiden. He had deserved an honourable burial for having died an honourable death in service to his King and country. 

Nobody will be around to bury Ingrid. She doesn’t deserve their grief anyway. Maybe no one will even know when she dies. That seems like the easiest situation to pursue. 

She writes Felix and Glenn’s names in the dust on either side of the Crest of Fraldarius. They can stay here with her, she supposes.

* * *

The kitchen is probably one of the dustier places in the manor. It’s too large for what was actually used by her family since it was built to accommodate a staff that her family had not been able to afford to employ. 

There’s an abandoned rolling pin wedged halfway under the counter that’s filled with splinters. Ingrid picks it up and places it atop the counter, flicking it with her finger and watching it roll, lop-sided, across the top of the counter. 

The Galatea manor kitchen had once been a beautiful kitchen, but the hardships of her house combined with the utter lack of care that has gone into this place since Ingrid left, have put it in quite the sorry state. 

She pulls down the tattered, moth-eaten drapes and throws them in a pile. She wipes off the table and opens a window to let some air into the place. The next step would be to find a few simple wildflowers from her garden to set in the middle of the table and then she would feel almost like it was the kind of place she might have shared a meal with Dedue. 

If he hadn’t been holding a grudge against her for both her treatment of him and then her siding with the Empire over her own King. 

She hasn’t really been able to taste her food since the war began and she had raised arms against the Kingdom. She figures that’s only fair. 

* * *

Mercedes is everywhere in her mother’s old study. She’s in the pianoforte at one end of the room and in the shattered china that litters the floor. Ingrid digs up a towel from the linen cabinet and wipes away the dust from the keys of the piano. 

She sits on the rickety bench as it creaks beneath her weight and rests her fingers on yellowed keys. The piano doesn’t play properly since half the strings are broken or worn, but the D closest to the middle C makes a light chiming noise that reminds Ingrid of Mercedes’s laugh. 

Mercedes had thought it funny that Ingrid could play the piano of all things, but Ingrid knows that she has never been any good at it. It had been purely for the noble appearance of it all. 

She manages to find a broom back in the kitchen and she quickly sweeps up the remains of shattered china and trampled tea leaves. A few of the pieces of the tea set, ones that were in the cabinet for safekeeping, have survived over the years, but they just remind Ingrid of her mother as well so she leaves the study as abruptly as she had entered it. 

* * *

Next to her mother’s study, is her father’s office. The room that, at times, doubled as a war room when Galatea still held an advantageous position in the war. Ingrid can only ever remember standing in the doorway of the room as a child, waiting to be granted permission to enter, despite never having received it. 

Her father’s study is where she had been told that she would marry Glenn and it’s where she had been told that Glenn was dead. Her father’s study is where she had taken Luín and told her father that she would not serve the Kingdom, that she had made her choice. 

She dusts the edges of the bookshelves in this room. It’s mostly battle tactics and farming techniques that have never born fruit, but there are the occasional magic tomes tucked in between as well. One of her brothers had had an aptitude for magic, even without a Crest, but Ingrid has never shared that blessing. 

Annette had tried to teach her a simple Reason spell once, but Ingrid had only succeeded in giving herself frostbite on her fingertips before the spell fizzled and Annette had laughed, warming her hands up with a perfectly controlled fire spell. 

Annette probably would have liked her father’s study with its leather armchair that is perfect for sitting with a good book and his sturdy oak desk that’s both a statement piece of furniture and also the perfect size and height for getting a lot of work done. 

Ingrid writes Annette’s name in the dust atop her father’s desk before she searches the drawers. Surprisingly, she finds a spare key to the manor in the bottom right drawer hidden under a bunch of paper records and letters. 

She hesitantly takes out one of the letters and stares at the familiar, curling script on the page. It’s Annette’s handwriting and it’s dated four years ago as her friend asks her father about Ingrid’s whereabouts and the situation in Galatea on behalf of House Dominic. 

She leaves the letter on the top of the desk when she leaves the study.

* * *

Ingrid’s own bedroom is the next place she dares to venture. The stairs and floorboards creak under her feet and she feels weary from days of heavy travel and fighting and horrible sleep, but she can’t stop now. 

At least the manor is empty. 

Her room is exactly how she left it years ago: a bed tucked on the right side with sheets pulled up neatly, like a soldier. There’s a vanity across from the bed, next to a dresser, and then there are three bookshelves, all packed full of books that Ingrid had collected as a child. 

The large window in her room isn’t broken, but the latch is stuck when she tries to open it, so she doesn’t force it. 

Ingrid studies the titles on her bookshelves. Most of them are knight’s tales and fairytales with knightly and chivalrous characters who would die and lay down their lives for their loves and for their rulers. There are a few Faerghan history books as well. 

Ingrid had always meant to bring Ashe home just to see her collection. She had wanted to share with him a new story that he hadn’t heard yet, since he managed to find her the Moon Knight, that wonderful story about the female knight. 

She has a few books that she can pick out, even after all this time that she knows Ashe would have been incredibly interested in reading. She picks books off her shelves until her arms are so full that she can’t carry any more and she dumps them into her fireplace. She doesn’t have a match on her right now, but she’ll light them up later. 

She’s got no use for books on knighthood and chivalry now. 

She brushes her hands off and moves to sit on her bed. Like everything else, there is a fine coat of dust over her sheets, but she doesn’t acknowledge it, sitting on the mattress that was always just a little too firm for her taste as a child. It hasn’t aged well and it sags beneath her weight. 

Ingrid leans back, falling onto her back on the bed, ignoring the puff of dust that flares in the air around her. She rolls onto her side, towards the far wall that her bed is pressed against and she presses her fingers into the wooden wall. She doesn’t have to search hard for what she’s looking for. 

Her fingers clear the dust from the carved crevices and then she’s staring at the carved letters: D, A, and B. 

It had been a silly childhood fantasy of hers to serve Dimitri as both a knight and also something more. Her crush had faded quickly once she had become engaged to Glenn.

For the first time since she had set foot in her old home, Ingrid’s eyes grow warm and wet. 

Dimitri had fallen in the rain on the Tailtean Plains and Edelgard had taken his head clean off with one swipe of her axe and Ingrid remembers that she had screamed. She hadn’t cried on the battlefield when Felix had died, but she had fallen asleep clutching the old Fraldarius Crest ring that Glenn had given her, dreaming of his brother. 

Felix’s death, at least, had been quick. Dimitri had watched his army crumble and his close ally, Dedue, mutate himself into one of the monstrous Crest-beasts. 

And then he had lost his head. 

Ingrid rolls onto her back and stares up blankly at the ceiling. The last time she had come to Galatea, before she had delivered her ultimatum, she hadn’t been alone in this room. 

She had told him to leave, but the only person she had ever known who was stubborn enough to ignore her stayed instead. They had lain side-by-side on her too-small bed, Ingrid’s head resting against his shoulder while his arm wrapped around her. It had been nice. 

She wishes that that had been her last memory of Sylvain.

She wishes she could just think of how warm he had been next to her on the bed and how it had felt when he had asked that night in the candlelight if he could kiss her. She wishes she could say that it had been enough for her to hold Sylvain for one night, that she returned to Fhirdiad or to Fraldarius or to Gautier with him to fight on behalf of the Kingdom.

Instead, she lives with the memory of driving Luín through the plates of his armour as she cried on the battlefield at the Tailtean Plains. 

_Do it yourself_ , he had said to her. _Make it worth it_. 

She had grounded herself after that, keeping her feet anchored in the sucking mud of the field as she had screamed and cut down anyone, friend or foe, who had tried to get close to her. 

Ingrid had buried Sylvain herself and stuck the Lance of Ruin into the earth like a cursed gravemarker. 

Lying on her bed, alone, Ingrid imagines Sylvain’s lips on hers and how cold he had felt when she had kissed him then, rain and blood-soaked. Her tears roll down her cheeks and she closes her eyes, listening for the wind as it blows into her home through the windows she had opened on the main floor. 

Galatea manor is full of ghosts. Ingrid feels like becoming one of them. 


End file.
